There is quite a bit of buzz surrounding a talk and pending paper from Prof. Murry Salby the Chair of Climate, of Macquarie University. Aussie Jo Nova has excellent commentary, as has Andrew Bolt in his blog. I’m sure others will weigh in soon.
In a nutshell, the issue is rather simple, yet powerful. Salby is arguing that atmospheric CO2 increase that we observe is a product of temperature increase, and not the other way around, meaning it is a product of natural variation. This goes back to the 800 year lead/lag issue related to the paleo temperature and CO2 graphs Al Gore presented in his movie an An Inconvenient Truth, Jo Nova writes:
Over the last two years he has been looking at C12 and C13 ratios and CO2 levels around the world, and has come to the conclusion that man-made emissions have only a small effect on global CO2 levels. It’s not just that man-made emissions don’t control the climate, they don’t even control global CO2 levels.
Salby is no climatic lightweight, which makes this all the more powerful. He has a strong list of publications here. The abstract for his talk is here and also reprinted below.
PROFESSOR MURRY SALBY
Chair of Climate, Macquarie University
Atmospheric Science, Climate Change and Carbon – Some Facts
Carbon dioxide is emitted by human activities as well as a host of natural processes. The satellite record, in concert with instrumental observations, is now long enough to have collected a population of climate perturbations, wherein the Earth-atmosphere system was disturbed from equilibrium. Introduced naturally, those perturbations reveal that net global emission of CO2 (combined from all sources, human and natural) is controlled by properties of the general circulation – properties internal to the climate system that regulate emission from natural sources. The strong dependence on internal properties indicates that emission of CO2 from natural sources, which accounts for 96 per cent of its overall emission, plays a major role in observed changes of CO2. Independent of human emission, this contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide is only marginally predictable and not controllable.
Professor Murry Salby holds the Climate Chair at Macquarie University and has had a lengthy career as a world-recognised researcher and academic in the field of Atmospheric Physics. He has held positions at leading research institutions, including the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, Princeton University, and the University of Colorado, with invited professorships at universities in Europe and Asia. At Macquarie University, Professor Salby uses satellite data and supercomputing to explore issues surrounding changes of global climate and climate variability over Australia. Professor Salby is the author of Fundamentals of Atmospheric Physics, and Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate due out in 2011. Professor Salby’s latest research makes a timely and highly-relevant contribution to the current discourse on climate.
Salby’s talk was given in June at the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysic meeting in Melbourne Australia. He indicates that a journal paper is in press, with an expectation of publication a few months out. He also hints that some of the results will be in his book Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate which is supposed to be available Sept 30th.
The podcast for his talk“Global Emission of Carbon Dioxide: The Contribution from Natural Sources” is here (MP3 audio format). The podcast length is an hour, split between his formal presentation ~ 30 minutes, and Q&A for the remaining time.
Andrew Bolt says in his Herald Sun blog:
Salby’s argument is that the usual evidence given for the rise in CO2 being man-made is mistaken. It’s usually taken to be the fact that as carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere increase, the 1 per cent of CO2 that’s the heavier carbon isotope ratio c13 declines in proportion. Plants, which produced our coal and oil, prefer the lighter c12 isotope. Hence, it must be our gasses that caused this relative decline.
But that conclusion holds true only if there are no other sources of c12 increases which are not human caused. Salby says there are – the huge increases in carbon dioxide concentrations caused by such things as spells of warming and El Ninos, which cause concentration levels to increase independently of human emissions. He suggests that its warmth which tends to produce more CO2, rather than vice versa – which, incidentally is the story of the past recoveries from ice ages.
Dr. Judith Curry has some strong words of support, and of caution:
I just finished listening to Murry Salby’s podcast on Climate Change and Carbon. Wow.
If Salby’s analysis holds up, this could revolutionize AGW science. Salby and I were both at the University of Colorado-Boulder in the 1990′s, but I don’t know him well personally. He is the author of a popular introductory graduate text Fundamentals of Atmospheric Physics. He is an excellent lecturer and teacher, which comes across in his podcast. He has the reputation of a thorough and careful researcher. While all this is frustratingly preliminary without publication, slides, etc., it is sufficiently important that we should start talking about these issues. I’ll close with this text from Bolt’s article:
He said he had an “involuntary gag reflex” whenever someone said the “science was settled”.
“Anyone who thinks the science of this complex thing is settled is in Fantasia.”
Dr Roy Spencer has suspected something similar, See Atmospheric CO2 Increases: Could the Ocean, Rather Than Mankind, Be the Reason? plus part 2 Spencer Part2: More CO2 Peculiarities – The C13/C12 Isotope Ratio both guest posts at WUWT in 2008. Both of these are well worth your time to re-read as a primer for what will surely be a (ahem) hotly contested issue.
I’m pretty sure Australian bloggers John Cook at Skeptical Science and Tim Lambert at Deltoid are having conniption fits right about now. And, I’m betting that soon, the usual smears of “denier” will be applied to Dr. Salby by those two clowns, followed by the other usual suspects.
Smears of denial and catcalls aside, if it holds up, it may be the Emily Litella moment for climate science and CO2 – “Never mind…”
“Can you think of any reason at all why atmospheric CO2 levels should continue to rise if human emissions suddenly stopped[?]“
And, of course, Salby has apparently concluded that CO2 levels are dependent on temperature, not emissions. I have merely demonstrated that the sensitivity could easily be in the range necessary to explain the rise in CO2 in the latter half of the 20th century, and so far in the 21st, as a lagged response to increasing temperatures.
Bart says:
August 11, 2011 at 9:21 am
If there is such a high response of CO2 to temperature and we had a 30 year slight cooling period 1945-1975, why don’t we see a lagged drop of CO2 in the period 1960-1975 (and beyond)? Or a near stop of CO2 increase in the period 2000-now. All we see in the record is a steady increasing increase of CO2 in all three periods, without any measurable influence of temperature on the increase itself.
“If there is such a high response of CO2 to temperature and we had a 30 year slight cooling period 1945-1975, why don’t we see a lagged drop of CO2 in the period 1960-1975 (and beyond)?”
I am not arguing that there is a fast response to temperature, in fact, I am postulating something on the order of a 30 year time constant.
I am arguing a fast response to direct CO2 forcings. I am arguing that the ice core measurements, assuming they are reliable, otherwise would drift considerably.
Remember the analogous simple system model
S(k) = S(k-1) + A(k) + d*(So – S(k-1))
“d” represents a short time constant process, so the system strongly rejects A(k) in favor of remaining close to So. But, So is a function of temperature, which slowly changes. You might hypothesize an additional equation
So(k) = So(k-1) + d2*(f(T(k)) – So(k-1))
where “d2” represents the gain of a long time constant process, and f(T(k)) is an immediate function of temperature at time step k.
Not saying these equations are valid representations of the actual system, mind you. It is just to illustrate how different responses to different stimuli can come about.
Maybe I should state things a little more explicitly. A 30 year time constant on a lagged response means that the corner (-3 dB) frequency, where the response is attenuated about 30% and increasingly with higher frequency, is at about fc = 0.0053 year^-1, i.e., anything with a duration of less than about 1/fc = 188 years is going to be smoothed with progressively greater smoothing as the duration decreases. So, you would not expect to see much of a response to a 30 year dip.
Bart:
I am enjoying ‘sitting back’ and watching you ‘wipe the floor’ with those who ‘have the faith’ in an anthropogenic cause for the recent rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration. It is good to be able to watch another do it and using some of the same arguments I have presented over the years. Thankyou.
Before making my point, I again state – as I always do – that I do not know if the anthropogenic emission is or is not responsible for the recent rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration, but the most likely cause of the CO2 rise is the temperature change that preceded it some decades before.
I write to add to a point you make at August 11, 2011 at 2:50 pm; viz. yousay,
“I am not arguing that there is a fast response to temperature, in fact, I am postulating something on the order of a 30 year time constant.”
Yes, and a “30 year time constant” is what the data indicates as I have repeatedly stated in this thread; e.g. at August 6, 2011 at 6:30 am
You are doing a fine job. Please keep it up.
Richard
Bart,
That all doesn’t add.
The response of CO2 to temperature is fast, but limited (4 ppmv/degr.C) on periods from interannual to a decade.
The response of CO2 to temperature is slow and limited (8 ppmv/degr.C) on periods from centuries to millennia, if the ice cores are reliable (the slow response has no problems with the limited natural variability beyond oceans and vegetation). The difference between the 4 and 8 ppmv/degr.C is mainly the slower response to deep ocean changes and vegetation area changes.
According to Salby (and you), he expects a huge response of CO2 to small temperature changes over decades to centuries. But that conflicts with the ice core data. Thus Salby suspect that the ice core data are wrong. But the ice core data were confirmed by other proxies, recently extended for over 2 million years:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090618143950.htm
Thus the ice core data are right and the huge response of CO2 on medium term temperature changes doesn’t exist.
Then the response to an injection of CO2 in the atmosphere. The sink rate is in exact ratio with the emissions, only influenced by the short term year by year temperature changes. The half life time is app. 40 years, slow enough to show an increase in the atmosphere over medium term, but fast enough to make that the ice cores (and other proxies) show little variation around the temperature dictated setpoint, because the natural disturbances (besides oceans and vegetation) where modest in amplitude.
The alternative explanation is that there is a fast response to CO2 injections by humans, but that another process is responsible for the current increase, but there is no knowledge of such a process, and that process should track the emissions at an incredible fixed ratio, without much variability. The invariability is something not seen in any known natural process.
Thus while it is theoretically possible, the assumption of a huge medium period response of CO2 to temperature conflicts with the short and long period data and the response to a CO2 injection assumes an unknown fast natural process which exactly tracks the human emissions without much variability, which is very unlikely.
Richard S Courtney says:
August 12, 2011 at 4:03 am
Great! I was afraid I was talking to myself there for a while. Interesting that we both hit on ~30 years independently.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
August 12, 2011 at 5:02 am
Ferdinand – I’ve made it no secret that I am, at best, agnostic about the ice core data. I find it puzzling that you put such complete and utter faith in them. My conclusions fundamentally are drawn from Michael’s chart, which is of direct measurements from the modern era, and from the lack of agreement in the fine detail between emissions and measured concentrations in the modern era, which we have discussed previously. It would be nice if the ice core data agreed with me, but I do not see it as a strong contradiction if they do not.
I suspect the model used for analyzing the shells of single-celled plankton buried under the Atlantic Ocean is validated against the ice core data, and so the data are not really independent and confirmatory.
We’ve probably more or less reached an impasse again, for now. I have other ideas to investigate, though, which could shed more light on the topic which we can take up at another time. I hope you have taken to heart my criticism of the “mass balance” argument, and no longer believe it is proof, in and of itself, of the anthropogenic driver hypothesis. If so, at least we will have accomplished something. Other random comments:
“…which exactly tracks the human emissions without much variability…”
You mean, whose accumulation superficially appears to be have a rough affine relationship to the accumulated human emissions. We’ve been down this road before. There’s nothing I see particularly unlikely in constructing an approximate affine relationship between two slightly quadratic yet independent time series – just do a linear least squares regression between them, and you will find the affine parameters which provide a best fit.
“…but there is no knowledge of such a process…”
Discovering knowledge is what science is all about.
Bart says:
August 12, 2011 at 11:07 am
Plankton shell boron isotope record was independent of the ice core record, but matches over the past 800 kyr, be it with lower resolution (1 kyr) and less accuracy (+/- 30 ppmv). Anyway, levels of 400 ppmv were not seen, not even for the previous warmer interglacial. Which makes it highly unlikely that mid-term influence of temperature on CO2 levels is any higher than long term sensitivity.
But indeed, we are – again – at an impasse. But as I replied at Curry’s blog: the mass balance argument still stands strong, as whatever other fast process takes over the increase in the atmosphere, it only replaced the anthro CO2 with natural CO2. That is turnover, not addition.
Stephen Wilde says:
August 10, 2011 at 3:24 pm
Please Stephen, have a look at the relevant literature about ice cores… Etheridge published his work about three Law Dome ice cores already in 1996, that is 15 years ago:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/1996/95JD03410.shtml
Unfortunately behind a paywall.
He measured CO2 directly in firn top down from the surface to closing depth and in ice at closing depth and below. At closing depth both firn CO2 and ice CO2 were equal. Values of ice core CO2 and atmospheric CO2 at the South Pole overlap some 20 years. They also match with HS-like CO2 increase. Sealing depth is at 72 meter and at 40 years ice age. Average gas age there is 7 years older than atmosphere. Sealing is complete in about 8 years:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/law_dome_overlap.jpg
Sealing depth, closing rate, CO2 average age and ice age at closing depth largely depends of the accumulation rate, which is very high at (coastal) Law Dome: 1.2 m ice equivalent per year, much lower at inland Vostok: a few mm per year, hundreds of years ice layers at closing depth, but CO2 levels still near atmospheric. Sealing needs hundreds of years to complete.
Note that where water is concerned CO2 flows from warmth to cold and maximum cold is in the air above the ice. That is how CO2 can still migrate upward out of the ice when the atmospheric CO2 content is higher.
Never heard that argument. Vostok ice is average at -40 degr.C and simply reflects the average air temperature above it (that is used in bore hole temperature constructions). Which is near zero in summer and -80 in winter. Thus according to your theory, CO2 migrates up and down over the seasons? Further, at -40 degr.C there is no liquid water in the ice, not even at the ice-air surface, except for some isolated dust inclusions. And during ice ages, the ice temperature was lower. When the warming to an interglacial occured, then you had a (average) migration from the air into the ice? Then the 180 ppmv from the deep glacial was even lower?
Ferdinand.
Thanks for the information about ice cores. I was just floating some ideas and will consider your points.
As regards the mass balance issue there is a way that it could be wrong as follows:
Humans release 100 units leaving 20 units unabsorbed. 80 units go into stimulated local and regional sinks. It could be that all of it gets absorbed locally.
Oceans absorb less due to higher temperatures from increased solar insolation allowing 30 units more than ‘normal’ to remain in the atmosphere. Or 50 units more if all the human emissions are absorbed locally.
In each scenario atmospheric CO2 content therefore rises by 50 units which is half the human emissions.
All 50 units will be C12 according to Salby. Previously the consequent change in the 12C and 13C ratio was thought to be entirely anthropogenic.
Without the human contribution the local and regional sinks would be less active and the natural system would be a net source producing a solely natural rise of 30 units or 50 units as the case may be.
In the two examples given the observed increase is half the human contribution which is approximately what we see in the real world. The mass balance argument therefore fails because it is a dynamic system responding locally or regionally with increased vigour to the human input.
Interestingly one only needs a small change in ocean absorption rates to achieve the effect. Approximately 30% (or 50%) of the size of the human emissions which would probably be just a minute fraction of the total oceanic flux.
On these figures the human contribution could be easily cancelled out by a very slight increase in oceanic absorption rates so the present setup should be regarded as temporary.
Likewise a small further decrease in oceanic absorption rates would have a disproportionate effect on atmospheric CO2 without any additional contribution on our part.
It is likely just a coincidence that for a portion of the late 20th century the effect of the increased solar insolation to the oceans ran roughly parallel to the rate of increase in human emissions.
The increased solar insolation to the oceans having been caused by a more active sun changing the air circulation so as to draw the jetstreams poleward, reduce global cloudiness (as was observed) and allow more sunlight into the oceans.
The smoothness of the change at Mauna Loa could be a result of the most dominant process being a longer term change in solar activity levels such as from LIA to date. Being dominant that process would suppress shorter term temperature effects other than the high frequency seasonal variations.
This reminds me of the mistake that some make as regards economic theory. Some insist that there is only one ‘cake’ of resources of a fixed size (the mass balance idea) and everyone must share it equitably. In reality the size of the ‘cake’ increases with greater economic activity (more human input) so most if not all people get richer.
If Salby is right and human emissions are irrelevant then that is how it must be happening.
Also, if Salby is right then the ice cores and various other proxies must be misleading for reasons we have not yet pinned down.
I note that plant stomata show much more variability but even they may well be under recording.
I suspect that it is natural and routine for atmospheric CO2 levels to vary by up to 50% over periods of several centuries and somehow the ice cores are not recording it.
After all a very small change in oceanic absorption rates must have a disproportionately large effect on the atmosphere because of the hugely different CO2 carrying capabilities. I see no reason for doubting that the oceans could cause proportionately large CO2 variations in the air on a regular basis.
“The observed behavior is what it is.”
Murry Salby
“…the mass balance argument still stands strong, as whatever other fast process takes over the increase in the atmosphere, it only replaced the anthro CO2 with natural CO2.”
(facepalm) No, Ferdinand, no. It is just a tautology about the system model. It confirms nothing.
It’s a one way street. Confirming that you have a slow system confirms that the buildup is anthropogenic hence, trivially, the mass imbalance is from anthropogenic emissions. But, having a mass imbalance confirms nothing in reverse.
“.Plankton shell boron isotope record was independent of the ice core record, but matches over the past 800 kyr…”
You seem to have an impression that you just pick out your plankton shell, look at it under a magnifying glass, and read out the number stamped on it giving ambient CO2. That’s not how it works. There is a functional relationship between what you observe, and what was in the air. Somehow you have to determine and calibrate that function. Now, how did they determine it, and what did they calibrate it against?
Ferdinand –
“The response of CO2 to temperature is slow and limited (8 ppmv/degr.C) “
How is temperature estimated?
Bart says:
August 12, 2011 at 2:50 pm
Ferdinand –
“The response of CO2 to temperature is slow and limited (8 ppmv/degr.C) “
How is temperature estimated?
The temperature record is based on D/H (deuterium/hydrogen) isotope ratio and/or 18O/16O ratio in the ice water molecules. The heavier isotopes relatively increase in ratio to the water temperature at the place of evaporation and again at the place where the vapor is condensing.
The coastal ice cores receive their precipitation mainly from the nearby coastal oceans, but the inland high altitude cores from near the entire SH oceans. Thus the ice core isotopes of Vostok (and Dome C) largely reflect the SH average temperature. The NH temperature is obtained in different ways, including sediments and for the past 120,000 years in the isotope composition of the Greenland ice core (which mostly reflects the North Atlantic seawater temperature).
Stephen Wilde says:
August 12, 2011 at 2:10 pm
Humans release 100 units leaving 20 units unabsorbed. 80 units go into stimulated local and regional sinks. It could be that all of it gets absorbed locally.
That is where the problem with your and Bart’s approach lies: even if 100% of all human CO2 is absorbed within minutes by the nearby trees or oceans, that is at the cost of the sink capacity of natural CO2, which should have been absorbed instead. Even if another (natural) process immediately takes over the emissions at the same rate. That process only replaced the human CO2 by natural CO2, but doesn’t add any extra CO2 to the atmosphere. The increase in the atmosphere then is not from an extra natural input, but from the reduced sink capacity by the human imput. Thus directly or indirectly, the human input is fully responsible for the increase in the atmosphere, except if the increase is larger than the human emissions, then you have a real contribution from natural sources.
Further, the 13C/12C ratio of the oceans is higher than the ratio in the atmosphere (even including the fractionation at the water-air border in both directions). Thus any huge contribution of the oceans would INcrease the 13C/12C ratio, but we measure a DEcrease. This effectively excludes the oceans as source of the extra CO2.
Further, any temperature change of the oceans gives not more than 16 microatm difference in partial pressure of CO2 in the oceans. Thus an increase of 16 microatm (~16 ppmv) in the atmosphere is sufficient to compensate for the increase of CO2 pressure in the atmosphere. Only 32 GtC is sufficient to do the job, or only 4 years of current emissions. We measured an increase of 100 ppmv in the past 160 years (80 ppmv since Mauna Loa started). That can’t be caused by increased seawater temperatures, the more that the biosphere reacts in an opposite way to elevated temperatures.
Because the pCO2 in the atmosphere is higher than the average pCO2 in the oceans, the average flow of CO2 is from the atmosphere into the oceans, not reverse, which is observed by ships surveys and a few long term series (Bermuda and Hawaii).
Bart says:
August 12, 2011 at 2:25 pm
You seem to have an impression that you just pick out your plankton shell, look at it under a magnifying glass, and read out the number stamped on it giving ambient CO2. That’s not how it works. There is a functional relationship between what you observe, and what was in the air. Somehow you have to determine and calibrate that function. Now, how did they determine it, and what did they calibrate it against?
The boron isotopes show the pH of seawater at the moment of formation of the shell. Further indications are needed to calculate the pCO2 of seawater and the seawater pCO2 need to be in equilibrium with the atmospheric pCO2 to be sure that these are equal over time.
Therefore they sought a place where the curent seawater pCO2 is in constant equilibrium with the atmospheric pCO2 and used the sediments of that place. Ancient changes were much slower, thus less problems to follow each other.
To calculate the pCO2, they used several other proxies. That is reflected in the SI sheet, see further:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/324/5934/1551.abstract for the free abstract
and
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/324/5934/1551.figures-only
the only figure (also free), which contains all what was used for the calculations. Check of the calculations was against modern day pCO2 levels.
The supporting information (SI) sheet (free) contains a lot of information how the data were obtained, including the assumptions they used:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2009/06/18/324.5934.1551.DC1/Hoenisch.SOM.pdf
Full article (behind a paywall) at:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/324/5934/1551.full.pdf
Resent global warming and cooling resulted from the relatively close alignment of the Great planets. Now that they are on longer closely aligned, the Earth’s climate will gradually return to normal.
That is because of a presently unknown Gravitational Thermal Effect. Such information on gravitation and physical anomalies is available at Lulu.com in a book called Matter and Associated Mysteries. It’s worth reading.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
August 13, 2011 at 2:24 am
Further, any temperature change of the oceans gives not more than 16 microatm difference in partial pressure of CO2 in the oceans.
The increase or decrease in pCO2 is about 16 microatm per degr.C. 1 degr.C is the maximum difference between the MWP and LIA, and between the LIA and the current warm period.
The average increase/decrease over ice ages (and the MWP-LIA change) is about 8 ppmv/degr.C as measured in ice cores, but that includes the opposite movement of the biosphere for temperature changes.
Carbon Dioxide is heavier than air. Whichever way you want to ignore this, you can’t. It means something specific about about the nature of the gases which comprise our atmosphere, the fluid gas air.
What it means first and foremost is that most carbon dioxide movement will be local to an area. And as AIRS discovered much too their consternation, this makes CO2 levels lumpy, not well-mixed. And their conclusion was that CO2 couldn’t be a player in some kind of ‘background’ well-mixed scenario, and that they would have to go off and do more work on understanding how wind affects the spread.
The Beck and stomata data are much more sensible to CO2 levels, production is mostly local. The Mauna Loa data is suspect because of this. There are measurements from Scottish mountains giving CO2 in the 300’s when this supposedly ‘background’ used by Mauna Loa was in the 280’s. What? A pristine Scottish mountain top was giving exaggerated readings way before the CO2 belching islands could show their figures any way near that?
Just how much Carbon Dioxide is produced locally in the Antarctic? There are volcanic eruptions and venting, but a distinct lack of GREEN LIFE around them producing any and from the chain of life depending on this. Just how much are the wind patterns capable of bringing CO2 from elsewhere? The Antarctic cores do not show the responses to the LIA and MWP and others which Greenland does. Why not?
Ferdinand Engelbeen
You probably mean that “the total of bulk matter must be accounted for”. There are several conservation laws, however the conservation of mass is not amongst them.
Richard S Courtney says:
August 8, 2011 at 4:22 pm
John Finn:
Your post at August 8, 2011 at 2:29 pm demonstrates that you are an offensive little oik with less understanding of science than a peanut. Other than that, it is content free.
Take your nonsense elsewhere.
Richard
—————————————
Yes, John Fiinn, you were very mean to cite Courtney’s law:
“You need to be aware that Richard has derived a special case of Henry’s Law known as Courtney’s Law. Courtney’s Law quite clearly states that Henry’s Law does not apply when it is inconvenient to the argument proposed by Courtney.
Actually Courtney’s Law can be extended across virtually any area of climate science, so when you ask Richard for actual evidence for his assertion (as you did in your post) you are violating the very essence of Courtney’s Law.”
Since Courtney’s law is itself only a special case of “climate ‘skeptic’s’ law”, which states (roughly) that it is permissible to use any set of mutually incompatible arguments, and promptly forget them when it becomes inconvenient, in order to show that global warming is caused by ABC (Anything But CO2).
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
August 13, 2011 at 2:24 am
“… even if 100% of all human CO2 is absorbed within minutes by the nearby trees or oceans, that is at the cost of the sink capacity of natural CO2, which should have been absorbed instead.”
This is gibberish. The sink capacity is quite elastic. It does not penalize the natural CO2 sequestration in order to sequester the human CO2, it expands to accommodate it. This is how natural systems work pretty much universally. You are hypothesizing a system response which A) would never have attained an equilibrium in the first place and B) is unlike any natural system ever observed in time and space.
“The increase in the atmosphere then is not from an extra natural input, but from the reduced sink capacity by the human imput.”
This is mere assertion. The world does not operate by Fernandian fiat. Sorry.
I am tired of arguing this. You are not even attempting to gain understanding, Ferdinand, just repeating the same mantra over and over again. You have been shown to be wrong both mathematically by me, and verbally by Stephen here and Pekka on the other thread at JC’s. I’m not going to respond any further. Any additional arguments you have to make should be understood to have the following response from Bart: “No, Ferdinand… you just do not understand feedback systems.”
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
August 13, 2011 at 2:54 am
“The boron isotopes show…”
Again, you fail to show an appreciation for how variable complex systems are, how many possible outcomes there are to such processes, and the potential for unmodeled processes to destroy the neat little narrative concocted to explain them.
Probabilities decrease geometrically, i.e., very rapidly. If you have an hypothesis of some part of the process which is 75% likely, and10 others of like probability, the likelihood of all hypotheses being right is not 75%, but 4.2%. This is why there are so many surprises encountered in the development of complex systems such as, say, a new aircraft. This is why end-to-end testing is so important in the development of industrial products.
When you have an hypothesized complex measurement process for which many uncertainties exist at many levels, the odds of high fidelity without end-to-end confirmation are, necessarily, quite small.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
August 13, 2011 at 2:54 am
Aha! As I suspected, they calibrated their results against the Vostok ice core. This is not an independent estimate of CO2.
Myrrh says:
August 13, 2011 at 4:52 am
Carbon Dioxide is heavier than air.
Yes, so what? Does that mean that every molecule of CO2, once mixed in the atmosphere, is rapidely falling down again? Of course not, one finds more or less the same ratio high up to the stratosphere. Only 40 years of lack of wind stirring in an ice core shows a 1% enriching at the bottom, due to gravity.
AIRS discovered much too their consternation, this makes CO2 levels lumpy, not well-mixed
Please look at the scale of AIRS. Well mixed doesn’t mean that everywhere at the same moment all levels are equal. That is only the case if there were no sources and sinks at work. CO2 needs 1-2 years to reach the South Pole, as most human sources are in the NH.
The Beck and stomata data are much more sensible to CO2 levels, production is mostly local. The Mauna Loa data is suspect because of this.
Many of the historical data and stomata data are suspect, because taken nearby huge sources and sinks, not well mixed and highly variable even over a day. Mauna Loa and 70 other stations, airplane and seaship measurements show very little variability and represent the bulk (95%) of the atmosphere.
The Antarctic cores do not show the responses to the LIA and MWP and others which Greenland does.
Depends of the resolution. The medium resolution (40 years) Law Dome ice core shows the difference between the MWP and LIA: 6 ppmv less CO2 for about 0.8 degr.C cooling:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/law_dome_1000yr.jpg
Bart says:
August 13, 2011 at 11:19 am
Bart, they compared the results of their completely independent calculations of ancient pCO2 levels with the Vostok and Dome C ice records. Which shows a good match. They didn’t calibrate their calculated pCO2 to the ice core records.